The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [16]
Peanut shells all over the floor. Smoke everywhere. Hubcaps decorating the walls. The cap-gun clang and bonk of pinball machines. People saying “Fuck” every five seconds and then laughing haw haw haw after they pour beer down themselves.
After all, I was just married. Some women never even get that far. The wedding ring felt new on my finger. That little diamond? I could still feel it planted against my skin all the time. When you’ve got it there for the first few months it feels a little bit like a gender award that you can carry around and display. It has clout. My ring — outside the mitt — broadcast its glitter as if I had just won it in a small-town raffle, the only prize most women get. He had gazed at me fixedly for hours on end and then he had just made me princess of some personal half-secret kingdom. Look, I could say. I am very young but singularly acclaimed. This absentminded man, he’s mortgaged his life to me. On me Bradley’s pale light has fallen. I’m subject voluntarily to his gaze from here on. It’s happy-ever-after time.
She sat on my other side. She had freckles in star-field patterns on the back of her hands, different patterns for each hand. On her right cheek was an odd dimple that appeared whenever she frowned, a dimple to break your heart. Her hair was mostly brownish but with a streak of something blond running through it to punctuate it. Up close I could see her eyes more closely, brown with a tiny flaw of blue in the right one. She was small-breasted like so many athletic girls and she held her shoulders together as if she were cold. She leaned forward and encouraged me to talk about anything. It was odd: she felt like the sun to me. I glanced down and saw Cassiopeia’s chair in the freckles on her left hand.
Jenny and I did a conversational dance, something very formal. She didn’t say anything about her leaping catch. She was talking about her cat instead. She had a calico cat named Ralph with urinary tract problems. She went on about this cat. Women often do. It’s polite to listen. I don’t like cats much but I listened to her talk about this cat Ralph and I hung on every word. She got the cat at the Humane Society, by the way. You might be interested in that literary coincidence. By listening to the stories of the cat I learned that she lived by herself in a sort of spare apartment on the north side. One of those apartments decorated with line-strings of plastic hot peppers up near the molding to provide cheer. I was imagining it. She kept her radio tuned to the jazz station. Too much traffic noise in her neighborhood made it hard to sleep. Hard to sleep. She said she tossed and turned. Uh-huh. I see. It would be sad to be alone in that bed with the ionizer buzzing in the corner.
And I was thinking: Oh, this is a wonderful moment. I have a new woman friend and I can talk to her about anything, by which I mean all the subjects that Bradley never managed to pay any attention to.
In the bar she was still lanky. Big feet. Long legs. And they all moved in a pleasing languid dramatic graceful performance. As if her body also were busy having a conversation. First it talked to itself and then it talked politely to me. Beneath that politeness glided schools of fish.
I told her that Bradley and I had just been married and that we lived in a basement apartment just as spare as hers, except for his paintings. She appeared to be quite interested in Bradley and so I told her about his work and his art and the jobs we did. She yelled across me to say hi to him, and they shook hands over my lap. Then I explained again about our apartment. Ours